This is the part that burns me the most. All this, for a handful of years to sit atop the ashes.

I really appreciate that there’s one character in Demon Hunter that has a gun. It works, and is incredibly effective… against lower-level demons. The world-ending upper-rank variety need at least a decapitation, and half the time, a secondary decapitation or dismemberment of some kind. Simply asploding demon parts with one or two shotgun slugs is not enough in that case.

As a storytelling device, it really grounds the entire power-system in both the supernatural and super-human. We get periodically reminded that a gun absolutely holds its own in raw firepower, but the situation is just a bit more of a problem than it can handle.

Exactly. God would probably want us to not need, want, or use the guns in the first place.

I’m all in favor of zuruck replacing return, because that just sounds cooler. Plus z doesn’t get enough use in my programs these days.

The presence of narcissism and sociopathy in the C-suite is due to selection bias, specifically for people with “bold” personality traits.

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28406658/
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886919307007
• https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychopathic-tendencies-help-some-people-succeed-in-business/
• https://marytaylorandassociates.com/news-insights/the-existence-of-sociopathy-in-business/

When you layer masking on top of that, you get a skilled individual that can navigate a lot of business situations. This all happens because they’re incredibly useful traits for making money, above all else. Ethics be damned.

Eh, it’s more like electromancy, but… yes.

That’s okay. The company is set to go IPO in two.

Rearranging entropy by moving heat from one place to somewhere else.

These people are completely broken.

Agreed. Here’s how I arrived at that conclusion, today.

who are high value

I positively loathe qualifiers like this. It’s the presumption that we all have the same values (we don’t), that theirs are the correct ones (really not), and that there’s some kind of objective attractiveness hierarchy in play (less of a thing than you’d think). It’s only four words, but man does this carry weight by conveying a willful ignorance of how people really work. It also something you’d likely find on a 4chan greentext.

take risks, they’re brave, they’re unafraid, they’re confident

These are also qualities shared with the mentally deranged and sociopaths. It’s easy to look like this if you’re crazy and/or don’t give a fuck about others. A dead giveaway is when they’re always like this. Meanwhile, good people that share these qualities are also usually esteemed for their deeds,how they don’t always act like this, and know how to be cautious, when to retreat, and that it’s okay to doubt.

And they have younger wives with beautiful children.

… and we conclude with a cocktailof misogynist double-speak, ageism, and prosperity gospel for seasoning. Just the thing to wash down this shit-sundae of a character endorsement.

Maybe. Depends on how well-sealed those bearings are.

You’d need ambush tactics

Smoke and rockets. At least until supplies run out. Then you get crafty: sticky bombs, fire traps, optical illusions, nets…

The last one is interesting since I bet they’re not dexterous enough to undo knots, let alone handle being tangled up in something. Once you know how they’re programmed, you hit them outside that envelope.

Possibly, but I’ll bet it’s too coarse to get into things. Middle-east environments are likely to be well within the operating requirements for any military-hardened versions. So think: dust, dirt, dry clay, and sand.

Diatomaceous earth, and any super-fine starch that can absorb lubricants would be my best bet here. A very, very finely pulverized sand or glass might also do the job. It might also be worthwhile to see what solvents and chemicals can penetrate sealed bearings, eat wire insulation, and corrode water-resistant alloys. Heh, maybe just a jar of brake cleaner would work.

That’s why they push this bullshit outside of the law anyway. More specifically, this is the act of an executive agency, and even then, a lone individual on a twitter account. There’s enough layers of “oopsie-doodle” and “come sue us,” that they feel pretty safe doing this shit.

Meanwhile, “in god we trust” is still on our currency…

deleted by creator

Well, I did have the older version on the left as a kind of rosetta stone for this. Plus, this kind of “init and/or return” pattern shows up a bunch of places, so it makes sense someone would want a quick version that’s harder to screw up or has fewer side-effects.

I’ve also spent years investigating better ways to do things through various versions of C++, D, Rust, Go, and TypeScript. After a while, the big-picture patterns start to emerge and you see different camps start to converge on the same kinds of things. Stuff like these weird features start to feel like learning a new slang term for something you’ve felt, but could never say so succinctly.

In the case of ??= it’s a more formalized Python x = x or y or x = x || y in JavaScript. The catch is that not all languages treat assignments like expressions that can be returned, so you get a clunky return as a separate statement; return (x = x or y) doesn’t always fly. That friction is all over the place, and it’s natural to want a shorthand for this very thing.

Sure enough, after searching a bit, ??= shows up in JS, PHP, and even Ruby has a version.

Edit: more context.

I find this alternate timeline incredibly likely. I had a friend in college who was all about SCO Unix back before they went evil, even when Slackware was the go-to distro. We would have a lot more BSD forks out here now, although NextStep (and maybe even OSX) would probably still emerge as one of the better commercial ones.

As an aside: what I find amusing is that Homebrew is basically BSD Ports, served from a git repo. In 2025, it’s a completely insane way to ship OS software to a single platform, but it does work.

Thanks. That makes a hell of a lot more sense now.

Eh, I haven’t touched C# since 2001. I agree that the more verbose style is more explicit, and so more readable. That said, I can figure most of the new style out from context.

• => is clearly a closure declaration operator, similar to JavaScript.
• x ??= y is shorthand for “assign y to x if x is not set, and return x” which is kind of nice.

There must also be some shorthand going on for getter properties being the same as methods w/o an arglist (or even a ()).

The only part that has me stumped is the unary question-mark operator: private static Singleton? _instance = null; I can think of a half-dozen things that could be, but I cannot decide what it’s doing that the original question-mark-free version isn’t.

::sigh:: This is the correct answer for a buttplug.io based workflow.

To be completely fair, I’ve worked in places that treat Git like it’s an over-engineered SVN and use the SVN workflow, fighting against the current the entire way. “trunk” would be just fine with that crowd.